If you grow up in a country with no snow or ice, you don’t know what broomball is (it is okay to ask, get used to asking).

TCKs are the only seniors in a room who have to clarify the question, “Where are you from?” (do you mean where was I born? where my passport says I’m from? where I go to school? where I keep most of my belongings? where I stay every few years in the summer? where my parents pay taxes and will get in-state tuition? where I came from just this morning?).

There are a lot of white people in the Midwest, especially in rural areas (notice, my kids are also white, but they barely realize it. What this means is that the color of a person’s skin tells you very little of their actual history and story. Ask questions, listen, be slow to judge).

Parents and students respond with more excitement to the prospect of a Starbucks on campus (as opposed to all the way across the street) than they do to a $15 YEARLY membership at a club that provides bikes, kayaks, paddle boards, sports equipment, and intramural teams to join. Or than they do to pretty much every other thing mentioned on tour. Starbucks is very important.

I wrote at Velvet Ashes about being an expatriate family and what that means for my kids. Honestly? I don’t know exactly what it means for them, they are going to have to figure that out on their own. I have some ideas and we have some conversations, but ultimately, as two of them are about to ‘launch,’ they will have to do some work in this area. From race to gender to wealth to faith, things have been different for my kids than they would have been had we stayed in suburban Minnesota.

My twins are seniors and our conversations have naturally turned toward university choices. For my family, of course, that includes conversations about America and culture, home and upbringing. We moved to Somalia when the twins were two and we’ve lived in the Horn of Africa ever since.

One evening, my daughter asked, “But what’s really so different about growing up here? How does my experience compare with that of a high school girl in Minnesota?”

Today’s Painting Pictures post is by Sezin Koehler and it is one of the bravest things I have read on-line in a long while. I am, through tears, grateful for her willingness to share her story, her journey, her steps toward healing. And I’m in awe of how beautifully she finds hope. It is so important to address issues of trauma and to look at how the unique experiences of third culture kids affect their responses and their healing. Murders and bombs and terror attacks in shopping malls remind me of how crucial Sezin’s courageous words are.

Under the Surface

Just six days from today marks the 13-year memorial of a night that drew a big, bloody line down the middle of my life: witnessing my dear friend Wendy’s murder in a random and senseless act of gun violence on October 28, 2000. We were celebrating Halloween weekend when we were held up at gunpoint and the woman shot Wendy before giving us time to hand over our wallets. It was a night the sky opened up and I had a glimpse into hell. And worse, my soul sister, a fabulous creative force in the universe, was gone from this plane.

Anyone with post-traumatic stress disorder knows how the incident fragments the way you experience your own life into a Before and After, and is often accompanied by a variety of personality changes in the process.

For me, adventurous and bold became timid and fearful, a virtual about-face from the openness and adaptability that once were a part of my Third Culture Kid repertoire.

At the time of the incident I was going to university in Los Angeles, and my family was living in Switzerland. Instead of coming to my graduation, my mum came to LA for the pre-trial hearing — the one that would determine whether there was enough evidence for an actual jury trial. These were the days before budget travel, and it felt more important to have my mom’s support in the first of three trials to put Wendy’s murderers away than have her at my graduation.

After the two-year process of testifying against Wendy’s killer and her accomplice, a series of events nothing at all like what we see in television crime procedurals, I went into an emotional freefall.

The American method for dealing with trauma or psychological issues is by medicating the person, even if the patient doesn’t want the meds. Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications made me numb in a way that felt nothing but wrong — I knew I should feel sad, I should feel scared, these were my mind and body’s way of processing not only the loss of my amazing friend, but actually witnessing her death. A short stay in the hospital later, on account of the medications, and I was across the ocean from Los Angeles to my family in a city I’d never lived in before. I couldn’t deal with myself, my job, my relationship or living in the country that took my friend and ruined my life.

My mom was still living in Switzerland, and because of the high number of UN and other aid offices headquartered in Geneva she found me an amazing trauma counsellor whose specialty was cross-cultural psychology and psychiatry, and one who also used art and drama in his sessions.

Dr Arpin tailored every meeting to the specific cultural background of the patient. My childhood spent in Sri Lanka, Zambia, Thailand, Pakistan and India as well as my time in Los Angeles became the cornerstone for my treatment. He also took into account my conservative Sri Lankan father and radical American mother, a dynamic in my family that was fraught with unease that had spilled over onto me since I was a child. He also noted the tension of my having lived abroad and experiencing my passport country of the USA through a deceptive media machine that hardly prepared me for the reality of the experience, one that took on new levels after surviving a gun crime.

India has been one of my favorite places I’d lived, and I often pray to Hindu deities among Buddhist, Greek, Roman, and even Celtic ones — a measure of pantheism marks my personal brand of Third Culture Kid-ness. Noting this, Dr Arpin would bring stories I’d never heard of Ganesh and Lakshmi into our sessions, which would help me focus on my writing, drawing and dancing as healing practices — the first time I’d ever done that in my life. He also brought my love of cinema, and especially horror films, into the mix, helping me find ways to empower myself and reclaim the things I loved but hadn’t been able to enjoy for years because of the “trigger” factors.

The most powerful exercise, and the one that demonstrated just how traumatized I was not only by Wendy’s murder but also by my Third Culture Kid childhood, took place in the small theatre below his office. He sat in the audience, put the spotlight on me, and asked me to describe my home.

“My desk here, by the window. Kitchen here. Bed here. Door here.” As I mapped out the space with my hands.

“Where are the walls?”

“No walls.” I said.

“No walls?”

“Nope.”

“And who can come in?”

“Anyone.” I replied, in a ‘no duh’ kind of way.

His puzzlement at my response of “Anyone” bothered me. The next week I asked him what other people say when asked the same question. He told me that most people have their rooms separated by walls, and people need to be invited to come in, the door isn’t just open.

I remembered reading in Ruth Van Reken’s seminal study on Third Culture Kids that often times because TCKs are constantly shuttling through various cultures, peoples, situations, we have difficulty setting boundaries unless actively taught how to do so.

The room exercise showed me that I had no personal filters, a trait common among Third Culture Kids, but one that becomes problematic when trauma and PTSD enter the mix. And I realized that the dramatic loss of Wendy, my first friend at that time to have passed away, was reminiscent on other levels of all the friends I’d lost in so many years of moving around. Back then there was no social media, no mobile phones, no Skype. Friends would often move to places with semi-functional mail service, or telephone lines that worked once a week if you’re lucky.

During the first Iraq war my family and I were on Christmas home leave in Milwaukee, my mom’s hometown. We were already on our way back to Islamabad when we found out that all UN personnel and consulate employees had been evacuated. It was a nightmare for my mum to re-route our tickets after we landed in Amsterdam to my dad’s hometown of Colombo since it worked out cheaper to go to Sri Lanka than back to the US or stay in Europe. On my return to school months later, my best friend had been evacuated and nobody could tell me where she’d gone or how to contact her. I didn’t find her again for 15 years.

Reflecting more and more deeply on Dr Arpin’s room exercise, so many memories from my childhood arose. The not-so-nice things of growing up between worlds, the tense and often frightening culture in my homelife between parents with polar opposite worldviews, being bullied at school, the assorted cultural difficulties place to place that amount to small traumas, but when put together become major.

We Third Culture Kids have a charmed life on the surface, but underneath, in the hurt and still-scarred places nobody really wants to talk about, there can be a great deal of hidden trauma that may only surface in the wake of a violent trauma as mine did.

The trauma of Wendy’s murder had opened up a floodgate of issues I’d never properly dealt with — all the goodbyes I never knew were the last time I’d see someone or someplace, the innate sense of rootlessness and never feeling I belonged anywhere not even in my own family, the toxic and abusive relationships that had wounded me because of my “Anyone” policy — the grief was overwhelming. Twenty-four years of it, all coming through at once.

Thankfully, I had Dr Arpin’s help and in the year and a half we worked together he helped me build some necessary walls and begin to put the mess of all the traumas into their own places. He showed me how to mindfully channel all the emotional mines littering my past into writing and creativity. All of this without even the offer of medication, unlike his American counterparts who told me that they couldn’t treat my PTSD without pharmaceuticals.

*Fragmented Heart by Sezin Koehler

And thankfully, I was a Third Culture Kid blessed to be able to leave my passport country and receive the treatment that helped heal at least the most acute symptoms of PTSD. Sadly, there’s no cure for post-traumatic stress disorder; one must learn how to manage it and ride its waves as they ebb and flow, perilous though that may be at times.

Next week marks 13 years since the night that changed my life and broke it into a Before and After. Being a Third Culture Kid indeed heightened my experience of PTSD; yet, at the same time, my unique situation as a Third Culture Kid was what afforded me a powerful path towards healing.

Trauma and Third Culture Kid-ness are forever linked, two of many heads on the hybrid monster Hydra that symbolize my After-trauma life. I’m now a fragmented being constantly in motion, fighting — sometimes myself, sometimes the past, sometimes change — and united in only one goal: storytelling.

After living all over Europe for the past ten years, Sezin Koehler recently repatriated to her passport country of the US and now lives in a tiny Florida beach town of ten thousand, hands down the strangest place she’s ever lived. When Sezin isn’t enjoying perpetual summer and coming to terms with life as a thirty-something in a retirement community, she’s also an informal anthropologist and novelist. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter

Today’s Painting Pictures post comes to you from Bonnie Rose, a woman of incredible and beautiful talent. Photographer, hair stylist, beauty therapist, and world traveler as a TCK and now as an adult expat. I am excited to share her words with you today about the third culture kid experience as a military child. Her fabulous graphic says it all. Be sure to visit her blog to see and read more from Bonnie.

Passport to the World

Third Culture Kid. Just three words that are so easy to understand on their own. String them together and things get a bit complicated. I can explain it in a couple of minutes or in greater detail but that does not mean the person listening will fully understand. Which is often the case when you have not walked in someone else’s shoes. I became a third culture kid because I was a military child who was born overseas and grew up hopping around military bases in Europe until I was seventeen. I have tried explaining my military upbringing and the culture of military families to my in-laws during a conversation about our differences. It was met with a response similar to ‘I know a military family and they are not like that’. When trying to connect with people who have not ‘walked in your shoes’ it is like hitting a brick wall. Growing up as a third culture kid, living a nomadic life, I have learned that life is not simply black and white. People dress differently, eat differently, parent differently, and basically live differently. Just because something is different, does not make it wrong.

I bring up TCKs frequently when it comes to conflicts where my life or choices are judged negatively. It boils down to the lack of understanding and seeing the world only from a small perspective. I do not claim to understand the the full spectrum of every culture in the world but I do accept the fact that we are all different. Different can be scary but different is also beautiful. There is no cookie cutter mold for how life should be lived and I have seen the negative outcomes when one forces a mold onto a different culture then it was intended for. As a TCK I can not fit in any one mold as I claim ownership over every country I have lived in and in every culture where I have spent a significant amount of time. I never know what the future will bring but I get excited by the possibilities, the lands I have yet to explore, and the people I have yet to know. All the while I cling to my past. For Third Culture Kids our past does not hold us back. It defines our character and who we are in life.

One of the biggest misconceptions about third culture kids revolves around our unintentional name dropping. I commented to someone about their trip to Italy with how I had lived in Italy twice and went on to recommend a great place for pizza. A third party chimed in with ‘no one cares where you have been’. Which was easy for me to dismiss as I know they are not a TCK and therefore do not understand what places mean to us. There is no home I can go back to, no house to return to for the holidays, and no one street that will contain years of memories and stories. My lifetime of memories is scattered across the globe and are as changing as we are as third culture kids. It has even molded the way I travel. I cannot go to a new country and not experience it organically as someone who grew up in that location. I do not want to stick out as a tourist in another land. As a TCK we mention places, not because we had the opportunity to be there, but because we left a part of our heart and our soul in the footsteps we left behind.

These past two years I have lived in England, my world as a Third Culture Kid has been met with a sense of normalcy. Something I had not experienced in the last ten years living in the USA. In my parent’s home country I was constantly a hidden immigrant. I looked and sounded American but was always an outsider. Here in England I am constantly running into other expats and other brits who have lived abroad. Even those people who have never lived outside of England have vacationed throughout mainland Europe. As a TCK I carry that nomadic free spirit and will always have an intangible sense of ‘home’. It will make my bonds with other like minded individuals attract more quickly as we share the same passport to the world.

Bio: Bonnie Rose is the author behind the blog A Compass Rose. She writes about her childhood as a military brat, her life as a Third Culture Kid (TCK), her travels around the world and the expat life her family now lives in Europe. She currently lives in Bath, England with her husband and are raising two sons who are also TCKs. She works as a Photographer and Hair & Make up Artist. As of this post she has yet to ever live in one place for longer than three years at at time.